The Crew 2 Laptop and Desktop Benchmarks

Hardly anything appears to have changed visually between The Crew and The Crew 2, despite there being four years between the two games. The textures, characters, their animations and the damage model could all be better in The Crew 2. The damage model is particularly rudimentary. Crashing into objects and other cars yield only stylized scratches. We could not get the cars to dent or lose any bodywork regardless of the impact to which they were subjected.

The Crew 2 has impressive draw distances though, and the reflections are pretty albeit not particularly sharp. Likewise, the cars are designed with such a high attention to detail that they often resemble both the inside and outside of real counterparts. For example, Ubisoft has done a great job at accurately recreating the Mazda MX-5’s distinctive dashboard and infotainment systems.

The visual effects are decent too. The day to night changes during races, the varying weather and the different seasons all create a good atmosphere, although some environments feel comparatively sterile. There are added visual touches like sparks flying and water splashes that add to the experience too. In short, there is never a dull visual moment on screen.

The Crew 2 generally does a better job at creating an interactive environment its main competitor, EA’s Need for Speed Payback. In The Crew 2, passers-by jump out of the way of imminent danger, while road boundaries like fences and pillars are destructible thanks to the physics system.

Overall, the graphics are fine, but they are uninspiring, as is arguably the driving model. The Crew 2 feels like an arcade racer rather than a simulation, with each vehicle handling in a similarly unrealistic fashion. Casual gamers will get their money’s worth out of The Crew 2, but many gamers will get sick of the game’s lacklustre collision system.

We did not get a chance to complete the story mode, so we can only offer a more general judgment. The story during the first few hours of play feels cliched and uninspired. The story mode is often poor in racing games though, so The Crew 2 is not particularly bad in this respect.

The keyboard layout and menu guidance are as cumbersome as they are on Need For Speed Payback though. It is obvious that Ubisoft designed The Crew 2 with consoles in mind when playing with a keyboard.

Fortunately, The Crew 2 has comprehensive graphics options. There are twenty graphical options across various menus which are organized by resolution, picture mode, brightness levels and details. The Crew 2 starts to come into its own from mid-range settings upwards, but there are often only subtle differences between default graphics levels. For example, High and Ultra hardly differ visually.

Graphics options can be set according to a few presets for those who do not fancy tinkering with the wealth of options available. Graphics changes are implemented without restarting the game too, which is a bonus as there are non-skippable intro videos and the game takes a while to load through Uplay. Uplay is effectively Ubisoft’s answer to Steam and acts as a launcher and store for Ubisoft games.

There are no load screens once you are past the initial boot up though, which is impressive given The Crew 2’s freely navigable open world.